Young men and young women actually go to college to take a course in Shakespeare or Chaucer or Dante or the Arthurian legends. The course becomes a mere knowledge course, as Professor Corson suggests. My own first acquaintance with Milton was through an exercise in grammar. We parsed “Paradise Lost.” Much of the current college study of Shakespeare is little better than parsing him. The minds of the pupils are focused upon every word and line of the text, as the microscope is focused upon a fly’s foot in the laboratory. The class probably dissects a frog or a star-fish one day, and a great poet the next, and it does both in about the same spirit. It falls upon one of these great plays like hens upon a bone in winter: no meaning of word or phrase escapes it, every line is literally picked to pieces; but of the poet himself, of that which makes him what he is, his tremendous dramatic power, how much do the students get? Very little, I fear. They have had an intellectual exercise and not an emotional experience. They have added to their knowledge, but have not taken a step in culture. To dig into the roots and origins of the great poets is like digging into the roots of an oak or a maple, the better to increase your appreciation of the beauty of the tree. There stands the tree in all its summer glory; will you really know it any better after you have laid bare every root and rootlet? There stand Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Homer. Read them, give yourself to them, and master them if you are man enough. The poets are not to be analyzed, they are to be enjoyed; they are not to be studied, but to be loved; they are not for knowledge, but for culture--to enhance our appreciation of life and our mastery over its elements. All the mere facts about a poet’s work are as chaff compared with the appreciation of one fine line or fine sentence. Why _study_ a great poet at all after the manner of the dissecting-room? Why not rather seek to make the acquaintance of his living soul and to feel its power? The mere study of words, too,--of their origin and history, or of the relation of your own language to some other,--how little that avails! As little as a knowledge of the making and tempering of a sword would help a man to be a good swordsman. What avails in literature is a quick and delicate sense of the life and individuality of words--“a sense practiced as a blind man’s touch,” or as a musician’s ear, so that the magic of the true style is at once felt and appreciated; this, and an equally quick and delicate sense of the life and individuality of things. “Is there any taste in the white of an egg?” No more is there in much merely correct writing. There is the use of language as the vehicle of knowledge, and there is the use of it as an instrument of the imagination. In Wordsworth’s line, “The last to parley with the setting sun,” in Whitman’s sentence, “Oh, waves, I have fingered every shore with you,”